Sophisticated software will enhance experiences

Government departmental activities in Australia and New Zealand are likely to be applied with a good deal more panache, finesse, design flair and practical success from 2014 on as entrepreneurs, from small Australian start-ups to French design groups with 10,000 employees bring out an array of new, sophisticated software.

One example of how this new approach can be applied comes from the French three-dimensional design specialist Dassault Systemes, a large design spinoff from the French Dassault aviation group which gave Australia the Mirage III.

Dassault Systemes has used the three-dimensional approach initially to do realistic-looking designs, subsequently to test how design items could be moved around and assayed against other equipment, more recently for life cycle wear-and-tear, management and maintenance projections.

But over the past two years, and probably for the rest of the decade, the key word is going to be “experience", according to local Dassault executive Christian Ebel.

It sounds like something a marketing agency might concoct during brainstorming while getting close to deadline. Its serious relevance is that it refers to all the day-to-day events, incidental experiences, impressions and overall feel of a workplace or sales venue which has a sizeable, if intangible, effect on the overall impact on customers and workers.

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It would entail a prolonged examination of undersea life, past experiences of veterans, prevailing attitudes of prospective recruits on top of the normal close attention to pressure welds, hull seals and underwater propulsion silence.

Mental shift

Allowing for intangibles and impressions, in the same way that a department might assess the lifetime cost of docking, periodic major overhauls and half-life refurbishment, may require a mental shift of gears for design and procurement defence executives.

But expanding data transmission capacity, improved links including the concept of co-design between different entities on major projects, and the ability to do enhanced business analysis on data in real time could mean a new facility to expand the range of considerations in defence and other government future planning.

For those higher level public executives who might be a bit sceptical of emphasis on personal feel, design flair and the importance of individual experience, a significant unveiling this month is a major partnership between the French group and Melbourne’s RMIT.

The two have been working on it since 2012, for use of several version six Dassault Systemes software sets in production teaching across several schools, including masters work. There will be a Dassault flavour in design and technical study for 1,500 engineering students from March, 2014.

The programs are also used to various degrees in 24 Australian universities altogether.

One tool which should appeal to departments such as Immigration, Health, the Australian Tax Office and all the others handling over 100 languages in a multi-cultural Australia will be the latest multi-anguage search software, under the Dassault brand Exalead.

While passable translations have been possible in various search engines between languages for some time, the software in use now is an order of magnitude better in flexibility and variety.

The user can just stick to English if desired, or specify a selected range of other languages, depending on need.

The search software has recently replaced earlier systems at internet employment site SEEK.

“It’s a very powerful search engine," said Mr Ebel. “It took just two to three months to implement. It is a very secure system for customers.

“It is business to business, used by many defence customers for whom security of IP is important."

Productive use of this software is enhanced by executives with enough creativity to ask original design questions.

The search engine philosophy allows customers to modify, tune and adapt the detailed software for their specific convenience, rather than insisting on a rigid no-tampering policy, as some other search engines do.